INC NEWS - fyi -- multiplexes in UDO (note to officials)

[John Schelp]

Dear Council and County Commissioners,

Last night, the Old West Durham Neighborhood
Association board voted unanimously to support the
recommendations of the Urban Tier Neighborhoods for
Durham's proposed Unified Development Ordinance.

Please remove language from the UDO that allows
multiplexes to be built in residential neighborhoods
of single-family homes and duplexes. Please remove
multiplexes from the RU-3 zoning category. We do not
want multiplexes to be allowed in the heart of our
urban tier neighborhoods.

Building multiplexes next to homes like ours will
destabilize our neighborhoods, impede re-investment by
homeowners, and threaten the stability of adjoining
neighborhoods.

More specifically, we request that all of Old West
Durham's residential core (from Englewood to
Hillsborough and from Iredell to Georgia) be
designated RU-5 and not RU-3. Please don't divide a
unified neighborhood into a patchwork of different
zoning categories. We want our entire residential area
to share the RU-5 zoning category.

Neighborhoods like ours, struggling to come back, will
face pressure from absentee landlords and developers
who will want to tear down old houses and replace them
with multiplexes. Current homeowners will leave and
new home buyers will be less likely to invest here. 

Reintroducing multiplexes, which were prohibited in
our neighborhood nearly fifteen years ago, is a step
backwards and will undermine the revitalization of Old
West Durham and other neighborhoods working to come
back.

We supported the high-density Station 9 apartments
over by Erwin Square and the 9th Street TTA station.
But building a multiplex in a block of one-story
bungalows is very different. It can tip the scales in
the other direction and we'll start losing other
houses in the block. 

Please adopt the recommendations made by the Urban
Tier Neighborhoods representatives in the final
version of the UDO. 

The UDO is a good document that can be a great
document. We're so close. Better to do it now and get
it right.

thank you so much, 

John Schelp, president
Old West Durham Neighborhood Association
www.owdna.org